Land

Pressure on land resources has increased during recent years despite international goals to improve their management. The fourth Global Environment Outlook (UNEP 2007) highlighted the unprecedented land-use changes created by a burgeoning population, economic development and global markets. The outcome of those drivers continues to cause resource depletion and ecosystem degradation

The discursive flexibility of ‘flex crops’

‘Flex crops’ such as corn, oil palm and soy are understood to have multiple, interchangeable uses; they have material flexibility. We propose that discursive flexibility – the ability to strategically switch between discourses to promote an objective – equally shapes the political economy of flex crops, and thereby patterns of agrarian and environmental change. Comparing oil palm and Jatropha curcas, we find that actors who cast oil palm as a multi-scale solution to food and energy insecurity, climate change and (rural) poverty successfully reinforce its high material flexibility. Jatropha’s proponents compensate for low material flexibility by positioning the crop as a ‘sustainable’ energy source that achieves both global and local goals. While this paper focuses on discourses that reinforce the oil palm and jatropha projects, understanding the power of discursiv